"Who is going to save our Church? Not our bishops, not our priests and religious. It is up to you, the people. You have the minds, the eyes, the ears to save the Church. Your mission is to see that your priests act like priests, your bishops, like bishops, and your religious act like religious." - Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, 1972

Saturday, August 5, 2017

PDN GOES BOSTON GLOBE...SORT OF

Yep. It's everywhere today...at least, everywhere USA Today is...which is just about everywhere. And it's not just online, it's in the print version too. Better call my mom and tell her to pick up a copy so she can see her son's name in the paper. LOL!

No doubt, it's an excellent article, and an even more excellent video. However, I am thinking about writing the following letter to the PDN.

Dear PDN:

Thanks for the great article and video. However, I couldn't help but wonder what you meant by this:

"An investigation by the USA TODAY Network's Pacific Daily News unearthed allegations of decades of assault, manipulation and intimidation of children reared on this remote, predominantly Catholic U.S. territory. "

Shoot, if I had known you guys were doing all this investigating and "unearthing," I wouldn't have worked so hard these last four years. So just what did you investigate? What did you "unearth?" Cuz, well, everything in this story was stuff we either handed you or was already filed in court. And the above excerpt kinda makes you guys sound like the Boston Globe!

And so I was reminded of the time that when it came to doing some actual investigating, you guys weren't interested, Remember?

Here, let me help. On August 22, I submitted an opinion piece which took direct aim at something you guys should have been very interested in: the obtaining of a bogus government document from the Department of Land Management (and its subsequent publication in the archdiocesan newspaper - as well as a support piece in your own), and the extremely questionable "remedy" which was "worked out" between the Attorney General and the "trained lawyer."

The next day, I received a call from Ms. Payne expressing reservations about printing my piece because of a lack of "attributions." I offered to send her the "attributions" and I also asked her to edit out a few words. I followed up our conversation with this email:

I then sent this email which included documentation for all of my claims:

Ms. Payne then called me and I asked her which facts they were not able to verify. It took a while to get to an answer, but it came down to my claims about the "trained lawyer" role in procuring the bogus copy of the title. So I sent this:

In short, the PDN did not have to investigate or verify anything. I had provided probably more documentation than they would have gotten themselves. But it appears I was "investigating" and "unearthing" things about the wrong people. My letter was never published.

The sad part about this is that with some real investigation by the media, we could have gotten to the bottom of Apuron's theft much sooner. But because the "trained lawyer" and the AG "worked something out," and the PDN was not willing to even publish a letter about it, we, the people in the pews, had to pay $45,000 to a lawyer to draft the documents which finally brought the Yona property back to the Archdiocese of Agana.